By SUSANNA KIM for Good Morning America (ABC News)

Amy Zvovushe, a senior program manager with a marketing company in Connecticut, alleges her employer asked her to resign instead of providing leave after learning she was pregnant, a claim of discrimination that too many women in the U.S. are forced to endure, advocates say.

Zvovushe, 31, said because she had worked at the company for four months her employer said she was not protected under the federal Family Medical Leave Act, which says employees must be on the job for at least a year to be eligible for up to 12 weeks of unpaid, job-protected leave a year.

Having left her previous job to join the company, Ryan Partnership, on June 1, Zvovushe said she was in disbelief she would not have a job after she had her baby.

After she told one human resources employee that she was pregnant on Sept. 23, Zvovushe said she met with two human resource executives who told her she would have to resign because she had not been with the company, which has over 50 employees, for 12 months.

Hear: Recorded Conversation That Allegedly Shows Pregnancy Discrimination

“The story shows how shockingly uninformed some supervisors are as to what constitutes pregnancy discrimination,” Joan Williams, law professor and director of the Center for Work Life Law at the University of California, Hastings, said.

Jack Tuckner Interviewed by ABC News

Seven states, California, Connecticut, Illinois, Louisiana, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Michigan, have passed laws requiring private employers to provide at least some accommodations for pregnant women to keep their jobs. Two states, Alaska and Texas, require certain public employers to provide some accommodations. Legislators in New York introduced a bill this week to provide accommodations for pregnant workers.

Dina Bakst, a lawyer, founder and president of A Better Balance: The Work and Family Legal Center, said many pregnant workers who ask for accommodations get pushed out the door.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is scheduled to host a hearing about pregnancy discrimination this month in Washington, D.C., in which Williams is testifying.

According to a recording on Oct. 31, Zvovushe alleges one human resources executive said, “The issue is in terms of what the legal employment action is, we have a job for you, you don’t receive protection under FMLA so technically if you don’t come to work doesn’t matter whether you’re having you’re appendix out or you’re having a baby or you’re dealing with a sick person you didn’t show up for work on Monday.”

“So in effect you haven’t come back into the office, so that’s why we view it as a voluntary resignation,” the woman in the recording said. “Because you are voluntarily not coming here because you are taking the time to have a baby, it’s not protected time within the law so that’s how we treat it.”

Zvovushe said she recorded the conversation without the executives’ knowledge. When her attorney contacted the company about the allegations of discrimination, she said they granted her leave to have her baby, born in January.

“Because they were able to fix it, they say no harm, no foul,” Jack Tuckner, her attorney said. “Many women, particularly inner city women, quit, because they’ve been told these things by a human resources director and vice president. They just hope women will just ride off into the sunset.”

Tuckner said his client has filed a claim with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the State of Connecticut Commission on Human Rights.

He called it “sexist irony” that the federal Family Medical Leave Act was enacted to protect working women, not for use by employers to discard pregnant employees when their babies come to term.

Michael Soltis, an attorney for the company, said the company declined to comment on the audio and the situation because they are a pending legal matter.

Williams said it is illegal to discriminate against pregnant women, who have to be treated the same as those with the same inability or ability to work.

D.L. Ryan Companies, Ltd., said in a statement, that it is an equal opportunity employer and over 60 percent of its workforce is female “with a strong representation in senior levels.”

“The company is proud of the opportunities and benefits it provides its employees,” the statement said. “D.L. Ryan provides its employees pregnancy leave according to state and federal law. Concerning the pending charge of pregnancy discrimination, D.L. Ryan has provided leave in accordance with state and federal law in that situation as well. The company is confident that when the Connecticut Human Rights and Opportunities Commission reviews the facts, it will conclude that the company has complied with the law and dismiss the charge.”

Cynthia Calvert, Center for Work Life Law’s senior advisor for family responsibilities discrimination, said it was not enough that the employer said it would also not give time off for recovery from an appendectomy. In order not to violate the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, the employer must actually practice that policy if it treats pregnant women similarly.

“In other words, if the employer has a “no medical leave for any reason” policy but in fact does not enforce it and allows people to retain their jobs while out for a couple of weeks on medical leave, then the employer has to let women go out on equivalent maternity leaves under the federal Pregnancy Discrimination Act,” Calvert said.

Connecticut’s employment discrimination statute also states women have to be given a reasonable leave of absence for “disability resulting from pregnancy,” which Calvert said she interprets as giving pregnant women a reasonable leave of absence for childbirth and recovery.

Wall Street has been occupied by those representing the 99%. But what about the top 1%? How do they fare? They might be throwing cakes at the hungry masses down below, but how do they share their pies? They might be unleashing atrocities upon the huge majority of people through criminal manipulations, but how fairly do they treat each other?

A look at their annual salaries points to crucial factors of inequality and biases within the top 1% themselves. The masculine, patriarchal and sexist nature of corporate greed duly relegates its women accomplices to the inferior salary brackets. No matter if the women are in the same ranks of CEOs or Presidents, they are just paid way less. In fact, the highest paid woman Safra A. Catz (President, Oracle Corp.) earns less than any of the first 12 highest paid men! And the second highest paid woman Wellington J. Denahan-Norris (COO, Annaly Capital Management) earns less than any of the top 25 highest paid male executives.

The cumulative total earning for the first 9 months of last year was $381,105,205 for the highest paid male executives, while the cumulative total earning for the highest paid female executives for the said period was $118,233,692.

When such disparities in pay across genders have been normalized within the top echelon, it is no wonder the financial bosses of the Wall Street do not think twice about the increasing class society afflicting America today.

Here, then, is the breakdown (first 9-month period, 2010) -

Top 5 Men

Philippe P. Dauman
President and Chief Executive Officer
Viacom, Inc. (VIAB)
2010 Total Compensation: $84,469,515

Mark V. Hurd
President
Oracle Corp. (ORCL)
2010 Total Compensation: $78,362,540

Lawrence J. Ellison
Chief Executive Officer
Oracle Corp. (ORCL)
2010 Total Compensation: $77,556,015

Ray R. Irani
Executive Chairman
Occidental Petroleum Corp. (OXY)
2010 Total Compensation: $76,107,010

Thomas E. Dooley
Chief Operating Officer
Viacom, Inc. (VIAB)
2010 Total Compensation: $64,610,125

Top 5 Women

1. Safra A. Catz
President and Chief Financial Officer
Oracle Corp. (ORCL)
2010 Total Compensation: $42,095,887

2. Wellington J. Denahan-Norris
Vice Chairman, Chief Investment Officer and Chief Operating Officer
Annaly Capital Management, Inc. (NLY)
2010 Total Compensation: $23,634,800

3. Carol Meyrowitz
Chief Executive Officer
TJX Companies, Inc. (TJX)
2010 Total Compensation: $19,252,740

4. Susan M. Ivey
Former Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer
Reynolds American, Inc. (RAI)
2010 Total Compensation: $16,823,900

5. Marina Armstrong
Senior Vice President and General Manager
Gymboree Corp. (GYMB)
2010 Total Compensation: $16,426,365

Sources: Equilar & CNN Money.

Occupy Wall Street and Slut Walk NYC

I’m a feminist because I believe in equality based on gender.
I’m a feminist because I believe that no one has the right to touch you without your consent.
I’m a feminist because I believe that all women should have free and unfettered access to reproductive health care and abortion services.
I’m a feminist because I believe women deserve equal pay for equal work.
I’m a feminist because I believe that women should be able to wear what they want to wear without fear of being assaulted or harassed in the street.
I’m a feminist because I believe that when a woman is sexually harassed or sexually assaulted, we should be asking what the perpetrator was doing or wearing so we can catch him, not what the woman was doing or wearing, so we can blame her for inviting it.
I’m a sex-positive feminist because I believe that sex and sexuality is not the problem, lack of consent is the problem. Clothing is not consent. Consent is consent. The only person responsible for a rape, or for sexual harassment, is the rapist or the sexual harasser.

I’m a feminist because I have faith that once we individually and collectively harness our feminine energy sufficient to offset the pure masculine ethos of the unregulated corporate person, with its unlimited billionaire underwritten speech—we will get back to a relatively lush, safe and sane America where we all share in the beauty of the commons and we all share the costs of maintaining our general welfare.

My name is Jack Tuckner; I’m the co-founder of Tuckner Sipser, a women’s rights/employee rights law firm in NYC, and I want to talk about two significant and related protest gatherings that occurred simultaneously in NYC on October 1, One was SlutWalk NYC, and the other was Occupy Wall Street, but they’re both really protesting the same pathologies afflicting our body politic.

The “Slut Walk” started in Toronto when a cop told a group of female university students to “not dress like sluts in order to avoid being victimized.” This victim-blaming mentality catalyzed a long overdue movement, as sexual violence and sexual harassment are still widespread in our culture and have been for far too long.

In our Rape culture, the rapist/harasser/assaulter fails to control his own impulse to molest, violate, humiliate, harass and/or abuse a female subordinate, for example, or a woman walking down the street, or date who is raped, because he feels little to no empathy, respect or equality between himself and his target object; like Wall Street’s Ayn Randian view of living in perfect selfishness, the rapist is a sociopath, he seeks only his own gratification, and sees his victim as an object, as other, as less than, so her pain, fear, shame, or death is of no consequence to him.

Now take Wall Street culture, part and parcel of Rape culture, only on the Street, the faceless rape “victim” is the poor, the weak, the young, the old, the sick, the middle class; the female, almost all us, really—99% of us, in fact.

In Rape culture, the male cannot or will not reign in his sexual and/or gender- conflicted impulses, so he acts them out on each woman who comes within his destructive path, and in the Wall Street (rape) culture, the boys continue to rape, pillage and plunder Main Street while its enablers victim-blame teachers, cops, fire fighters, factory workers, students, Medicare recipients, immigrants, the EPA; seniors and the unemployed whose benefits are running out–these are the victims that Wall Street blames–the greedy, needy $40,000 per year worker trying to pay her bills, never mind the 2 billion dollar per year hedge fund manager who pays way less percentage of his “earnings” into the common coffer than the rest of us poor folk.

Rape culture and Wall Street culture are symptoms of Male Privilege run amok. No Yin, All Yang. All brain and balls; no heart and no soul.

As women’s rights advocates, we support Occupy Wall Street, as well as drastic changes to our criminal crony corporate culture. Women should not have to face deep cuts to the Women, Infant and Children nutrition program to cut down on low infant birth weights, so that another American company can join the other 18,000 companies incorporated in the same building in the Cayman islands to avoid paying federal taxes to help our country pay its bills. Is that patriotic?

And kids shouldn’t be kicked out of Head Start programs, and young people shouldn’t have to give up their Pell Grants and therefore college, so that the million dollar an hour hedge fund manager who wrecked the economy on purpose can continue to pay a 15% marginal tax rate on his “capital gains” cause he skims other people’s money for a living. And we can’t let these hoods in Congress get away with vilifying, scamming, investigating and destroying Planned Parenthood, the nation’s leading sexual and reproductive health care provider, just because they take care of our American girls and women. Shame on those bastards.

Social, economic and gender injustice affects and poisons everything. Look at this bleak landscape we’re living in—and the reason is simple—the billionaires and giant transnational corporations increasingly own and control our commons, and they own the elected leaders through the use of 37,000 highly paid lobbyists in Washington, yet they steadfastly refuse to join us in the fight to keep the jobs in America, to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure by investing in this country they profess to love. Wall Streeters and the politicians they own are stingy, greedy, selfish, small-minded and mean-spirited, and they’re dumb too, as they apparently aspire to living filthy rich in a poor country.

As corporations are now “persons” under the Supreme Court’s grotesque 2010 ruling, yet we still can’t get the Equal Rights Amendment for women passed into law, let’s never forget that first and foremost, we must vigilantly strive to raise the status of women while lowering the status of corporations, if economic, social and gender justice is our goal.

By Jack Tuckner, Esq

Voter ID laws hurt female voter interests, as well as the interests of the rest of us, and though the first time you hear Republicans explain that they’re only in favor of compulsory photo identification at the polls in order to stop voter fraud, it sounds reasonable, until you realize that’s just a transparent pretext for their real agenda, suppressing voter turnout in general to help their chances of winning. There’s absolutely zero evidence that voter fraud of the type that could be deterred by photo ID is a significant problem in the United States. A five-year effort by the Bush Justice Department “turned up virtually no evidence of any organized effort to skew federal elections,” according to reporting by the NY Times. They found no evidence of double voting or other types of fraud that an ID requirement would prevent. It’s all about suppressing the will of “we the people” (remember us?) by ensuring that vast numbers of ordinary citizens are disallowed from voting, whether by hook or by crook. Here’s how Paul Weyrich, the co founder of the Heritage Foundation­, Moral Majority, and other right-wing Republican groups explains the conservati­ve opinion on voting:

“I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of the people. They never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

Republican politicians and the corporations and wealthy special interests groups and individual who pull their strings, want as keep as few African-Americans, women, Latinos, the young, the elderly, the poor, the vulnerable, and the sick from voting as they possibly can, as every vote counts equally, and it is rightly assumed that most of us who aren’t wealthy white men will vote for a candidate who cares about the general welfare of our country and the real persons who comprise the beating heart of our great country, not the corporate “persons” who pay to get rich Republicans to do its selfish bidding.

Voter ID laws place an unnecessary hardship on women, as those who are newly married or recently divorced may have name changes issues (unfortunately, U.S. women still change their names in 90 percent of marriages) and their passport or birth certificate may be in their former names, meaning that may be required to obtain a certified court document showing the divorce decree or marriage certificate. These documents vary in cost from state to state but can cost upwards of $25 plus any time off work needed to obtain them. For each additional burden placed on a voter the likelihood of voting diminishes.

You may need a driver’s license to drive a car or get on a plane, but those activities are privileges not rights. Voting for a candidate that represents our true interests should be an unfettered right; in fact it should be required in a true democracy. Nine decades after women won the right to vote, that right is under attack by big business and its enablers in government.

(Related Story from the Women’s Media Center)

State Republicans have introduced nearly 1,000 laws restricting women’s reproductive health access. Here are 10 of the worst states to be a woman between puberty and menopause.

May 9, 2011 |
In a time of war and record unemployment, the GOP is sending a message: fertile women are the country’s number one enemy, and their freedoms must be quashed at all costs. State Republican (and some Democratic) legislators have introduced nearly 1,000 laws restricting women’s reproductive health access on the state level, and this is on top of decades of reproductive health policies that have made women second-class citizens in many states.

Here are 10 of the worst states to be a woman between puberty and menopause:

1. Mississippi. Mississippi has been such a bad state for women for so long it rarely even gets noticed in the news anymore. Legal and cultural harassment has reduced the number of abortion providers in the state to two, making the abortion rate in the state four times lower than the rest of the country. This doesn’t mean that women in Mississippi don’t need abortions; just that they go out of the state to get the services, making the actual abortion rate much closer to the national average. The demand is surely higher and not being met, as Mississippi is far from the place to go for decent sex education and birth control. Mississippi has the third highest teen birth rate in the country, the fifth highest maternal mortality rate, and fifth highest rate in STD transmissions. Because women can’t say no to childbearing easily, one in three Mississippi children live in poverty.

2. Texas. Thirty-five percent of women in their childbearing years are uninsured in Texas, making the need for subsidized family planning services especially strong in the state. Republican lawmakers responded to this need by slashing family planning funding, while leaving untouched the money the state spends on crisis pregnancy centers, even though these centers offer no real services women need. But even this isn’t enough for the Texas GOP. Republicans are currently concocting a scheme that would dismantle the entire state program dedicated to reproductive health care for low-income women. Just in case there was any doubt left in women’s minds that Texas Republicans hate them, Rick Perry will be signing an ultrasound requirement to get an abortion.

3. South Dakota. Anti-choicers in South Dakota tried to ban abortion in 2006, but the non-misogynist population turned up at the polls and beat the ban back. But searing hatred for ovulating women will not be thwarted so easily! The state then passed a law requiring women to wait 72 hours and subject themselves to a hectoring lecture at a crisis pregnancy center before they can get an abortion. Surprise! It turns out that no crisis pregnancy centers have applied to be official counseling centers. It makes sense, since by agreeing to do so, they’re allowing women to fulfill their paperwork requirements to get an abortion. Letting crisis pregnancy centers become an impassable obstacle to abortion has given misogynist legislators a way to deprive women of any ability to get an abortion while leaving abortion technically legal.

4. Indiana. Not to be outdone by South Dakota, Indiana has gone a step further and moved toward attacking both contraception and abortion access. Gov. Mitch Daniels recently signed a law banning abortions after 20 weeks, and cutting off all federal funding for family planning. Lawmakers claimed they only wanted to attack clinics that also provide abortions, but because of federal non-discrimination policy, the law basically means an end to all federal funding of contraception, as well as STD testing and treatment. Now women in Indiana who rely on Medicaid and Title X subsidies to afford contraception will have to come up with hundreds of dollars they don’t have for contraception, or go without and run the high risk of unwanted pregnancy. The Guttmacher Institute estimates that without these clinics, teen pregnancy would be 21 percent higher and there would be about 3,500 more abortions in the state a year.

5. Oklahoma. Oklahoma legislators looked at how Indiana Republicans are using the specter of abortion to cut off contraception and thinking of ways they can expand on that for brand-new ways to punish women for having working uteruses. Why stop at attacking women not giving birth, when you have women who have babies to punish, as well? With this in mind, the Oklahoma House passed a bill that would eliminate independent contractors from administering Women, Infants and Children (WIC), a federal program that distributes nutrition vouchers to low-income women with children. As usual, Planned Parenthood was cited as the reason, with the GOP claiming the organization is so evil that it’s better to starve babies than allow Planned Parenthood to receive government funding. In practice, the result is one more punishment inflicted on women, this time for having the nerve to have babies who need to eat.

6. Kansas. Kansas went from being a pretty bad place to be a woman to a hellhole rapidly, between the murder of Dr. George Tiller in 2009 and the recent election of devout misogynist Sam Brownback as governor. The murder emboldened the radical anti-choice movement, as it resulted in the closure of Tiller’s clinic and proved to them that terrorism does work. Because of this, anti-choicers in the area moved to terrorizing Dr. Mila Means, a Kansas family doctor who was discovered receiving training to provide abortion. So far, Dr. Means has been unable to find relief from the harassment campaign at her office and her home, and a federal judge refused to issue a restraining order against Angel Dilliard, an anti-choice fanatic who has been threatening Dr. Means’ life.

Despite the atmosphere of fear and violence, Gov. Brownback is giving the terrorists what they want by signing more abortion restrictions into law, and pushing to strip family planning funding from women who depend on it.

7. Minnesota. So much for “Minnesota nice.” The much-ballyooed unwillingness to be confrontational was shoved aside by Minnesota legislators who are all too willing to simply ignore court rulings that restrain misogynist legislation. Legislators sent a big F-you last week both to the supreme courts of the nation and their own state by passing two laws that have already been deemed illegal by the courts. One, a ban on abortions after 20 weeks, violates the Supreme Court’s ruling that abortions can only be banned after viability. The other, a law banning public funding of abortion, violates the Minnesota supreme court ruling that found that such a ban violates women’s right to equal treatment under the law. Minnesota Republicans may not confront you on most things, but they’re willing to take it to the mat to deprive women of basic equality.

8. Georgia. Last year, reproductive justice advocates beat back a bill that would require doctors to “screen” women of color having abortions for some kind of pressure to abort because of race. By inventing a non-existent problem (women of color aborting because of racism) legislators would have put doctors in a position where providing abortion to any woman of color could result in jail time, which could make the service only available to white women. The bill didn’t pass, but it did end up kicking off a nationwide frenzy of anti-choicers attacking the reproductive rights of women of color specifically while pretending to be concerned about racism.

In reality, Georgia is a terrible place for women of childbearing age, especially women of color. The state has the highest maternal mortality rate in the country, and maternal mortality disproportionately affects women of color. Real concern for the well-being of women of color would start with doing something about the maternal mortality rate, not feigning concern about their reasons for abortion.

9. Arizona. Race-based abortion restrictions may have failed in Georgia, but unfortunately, such a law recently passed in Arizona, a state that can’t even pretend that it’s not run by a bunch of wild-eyed racists. The “concern” for women of color aborting because of racism is laughable in a state where the legislature basically accused President Obama of not being a real citizen on no real evidence besides his appearance and in which it’s now the law for the police to harass Hispanic citizens for their papers. Of course, Arizona ignores the real problems facing women of its state — 23 percent of women of child-bearing age are going without insurance coverage; the state has the third highest teenage pregnancy rate in the country; and 23 percent of Arizona children live in poverty. In light of all this, the safe assumption is race-based abortion laws are about making it that much harder for women of color to get abortions, which makes these laws not anti-racist, but just plain racist.

10. Louisiana. Louisiana has a ban on abortion on the books in case Roe v. Wade is overturned, as well as a host of other restrictions on abortion that have reduced the number of providers to seven in the state. Despite this, a Louisiana legislator has introduced a bill to ban abortion, apparently on the theory that if you pass the same illegal law over and over, it might just take. In addition, Gov. Jindal has indicated support for laws that would put additional restrictions in place for women of color seeking abortion, modeled on the abortion law in Arizona. As in Georgia, the concern for women of color is a centimeter deep; the state ranks 46th in maternal mortality and there’s no evidence that Republican legislators are lifting a finger to save the lives of women who do have their babies.

The fact that possibility of government shutdown is squarely dependent upon the abortion issue is less about budgets, and more about the sexist society we collectively have fostered in this country.

A bunch of conservative men across political and socio-economic spectrum have somehow taken up the mantle of deciding what is appropriate for women when it comes to their most fundamental right – the right over their body.

Were men capable of reproducing, a question over abortion would never have become a public debate. It is only a “white knight” society that would presuppose the men have inbuilt intelligence superiority when it comes to mapping out not only what women are capable of doing, but also what they must be allowed to imagine of doing.

Contrary to popular discourse, abortion issue is not a legal question. Anti-abortion campaign is a social fix that heralds patriarchy, one that renders women as baby-producing machines, and worse, one that looks upon at women as a child-rearing gender. A glorification of motherhood, a sanctity upon women as gendered creatures that are born to reproduce to male whims, and a mandate that demands women to comply to male standards of family roles. Women in effect must turn into dishwashers, washing machines, microwaves, and mothers.

It is not merely unfortunate that the United States is at a crossroads over a most fundamental human right that uniquely belongs to women. It is in many ways, a predictable continuation of a strand of worldwide reactionary movements serving as backlash to feminists everywhere.

And most importantly, the possible government shutdown is a crucial reminder that the most pressing issue in front of the world is the one involving women’s reproductive rights, the ones being controlled thus far by the men. It will only be fruitful a debate if the President and rest of the politicians reach a consensus that it is not about federal budgets. It is about patriarchy. There is no telling how both Republicans and the Democrats contribute to the gender status quo.

If Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. feels the nation is full of cowards when it comes to holding honest discussions about race, the reality is when it comes to women’s reproductive rights and human rights of LGBT, the country is full of stinking shit. And despite what happens at the Capitol Hill today, cleaning up the shit takes more than a bunch of sexist pigs.

In fact, quite the contrary.

What is most noteworthy is the fact that in the three most respected professional fields – law, medicine and business – women are treated most abysmally. Despite the stringent manners of admissions into professional schools that awards degrees in these coveted areas of expertise, and the accompanying social status that identifies virtues of honesty and integrity with these specializations, it so appears – from the latest US Department of Labour statistics – that the most esteemed professional fields are also the most exploitative ones as well. At least so far as gender inequality is concerned.

In legal occupations, American women earn 56 cents per dollar that the men earn. Legal professions include the jobs of lawyers, judges, magistrates, other judicial workers, paralegals, legal assistants, and miscellaneous legal support workers. Likewise, in the medical profession, among the physicians and surgeons, women earn 64 cents per dollar the men earn. Third highest hall of shame is reserved for business management executives. Female financial managers earn 66 cents per dollar their male counterparts earn and women human resources managers earn 69 cents per dollar.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, women still lag far behind men in almost all the industries. The inequality exists most clearly for instance among physicians and surgeons (women $1,228, men $1,914), loan counsellors (women $754, men $1,118), purchasing managers (women earn $1,029 weekly, men earn $1,383), claims adjusters, investigators (women $845, men $1,128), computer programmers (women $1,182, men $1,267), lawyers (women $1,449, men $1,934), postsecondary teachers (women $1,030, men $1,342), retail salespersons (women $443, men $624), real estate brokers (women $745, men $939), inspectors, testers (women $513, men $754), financial services sales agents (women $798, men $1,237), etc.

Among several hundreds of jobs that were surveyed, women were found to be earning slightly more than the men only in the fields of bartending and baking.

As we begin the Women’s History Month, the above serve as timely reminders as to how the history needs to be revisited and radical feminist movements be reintroduced.

There’s no question that his advertisement is discriminatory under federal law, and it’s hard to believe anyone would try to defend it with a straight face without sounding like Nathan Thurm, the nervous, sweating, chain smoking lawyer played by Martin Short on SNL.

    A Bona Fide Occupational Qualification (BFOQ) is a defense to acknowledged discrimination under basic civil rights laws, where an employer is permitted to discriminate against an employee on the basis of religion, sex, national origin or age in those instances where those protected statuses are a “bona fide occupational qualification reasonably necessary to the normal operation of the particular business or enterprise.” 

    On a case by case basis, to determine if a discriminatory policy constitutes a BFOQ, first look at the particular job in question and what it requires to perform it.  Then look to the discriminatory policy and determine if it is necessary to performing that job.  For example, airline pilots are prohibited from serving as captain after reaching the age of 60.  This discriminatory rule is based on the reasonable notion that a pilot’s skills deteriorate with age, and that the safety of the passengers depend most essentially on the captain.    Yet, if a 60 year old pilot is working as a flight engineer, for example, he could not be fired for this reason, as age is not a BFOQ for that position.  This exception also holds true for French restaurants hiring exclusively French-born chefs, for example, but would fail if used to support the failure to hire a non-French janitor, as it’s not “reasonably necessary” to the authenticity of the restaurant.  Similarly, a religious school may discriminate in its hiring decisions regarding its faculty, limiting acceptable religious beliefs to the school’s denomination, but it may not do so with its secretarial hiring decisions, as whether the secretary is Catholic or not has no connection to the integrity of its Catholic identity.

    The employer must prove “plainly and unmistakably” that the admitted discriminatory policy, such as only hiring male “housepersons” meets the terms and spirit of this narrow BFOQ exception to our civil rights statutes.  An employer  must demonstrate (and ultimately prove in court) that its discriminatory practice is “reasonably related” to an essential operation of its business, which is often a common sense analysis, such as, whether a men’s clothing manufacturer would be permitted to advertise to hire only male models (it would). 

    In the case of this advertised housekeeping position, not only isn’t there a reasonable relationship between the job description given and the male gender of the applicant, there isn’t even an rationale, articulable basis to argue for such a counter-intuitive and just plain silly and obvious sex discriminatory advertisement.  I’m sure the real reason is something as mundane, typical, customary and sad as the owner’s strong preference for hiring only men. 

By PEGGY ORENSTEIN

A friend of mine’s 12-year-old daughter has taken to wearing a bracelet, one of those rubber, Lance Armstrong-style affairs, that says on it, “I ? Boobies.”

“Oh, yeah,” she said, vaguely, when questioned about it. “It’s for breast cancer.”
Really?
It’s hard to remember that, not so long ago, the phrase “breast cancer” was not something women spoke aloud, even among themselves. It wasn’t until the early 1970s, with the high-profile diagnoses of the former child star Shirley Temple Black, the first lady Betty Ford and Happy Rockefeller that the disease went public. A short time later, Betty Rollin, an NBC-TV correspondent, published the groundbreaking memoir “First You Cry.” Back then, her grief over losing her breast and the blow cancer dealt to her sex life was greeted with hostility by some critics and dismissed as frivolous. Mammography was just coming into use to detect early-stage tumors. The American Cancer Society was still resisting the idea of support groups for post-mastectomy patients. A woman like Rollin, some said, was supposed to be grateful that she qualified for a radical mastectomy, stuff a sock in her bra and get on with it.

Fast-forward to today, when, especially during October, everything from toilet paper to buckets of fried chicken to the chin straps of N.F.L. players look as if they have been steeped in Pepto. If the goal was “awareness,” that has surely been met — largely, you could argue, because corporations recognized that with virtually no effort (and often minimal monetary contribution), going pink made them a lot of green.

But a funny thing happened on the way to destigmatization. The experience of actual women with cancer, women like Rollin, Black, Ford and Rockefeller — women like me — got lost. Rather than truly breaking silences, acceptable narratives of coping emerged, each tied up with a pretty pink bow. There were the pink teddy bears that, as Barbara Ehrenreich observed, infantilized patients in a reassuringly feminine fashion. “Men diagnosed with prostate cancer do not receive gifts of Matchbox cars,” she wrote in her book “Bright-Sided.”

Alternatively, there are what Gayle Sulik, author of “Pink Ribbon Blues,” calls “She-roes” — rhymes with “heroes.” These aggressive warriors in heels kick cancer’s butt (and look fab doing it). Like the bear huggers, they say what people want to hear: that not only have they survived cancer, but the disease has made them better people and better women. She-roes, it goes without saying, do not contract late-stage disease, nor do they die.
That rubber bracelet is part of a newer, though related, trend: the sexualization of breast cancer. Hot breast cancer. Saucy breast cancer. Titillating breast cancer! The pain of “First You Cry” has been replaced by the celebration of “Crazy Sexy Cancer,” the title of a documentary about a woman “looking for a cure and finding her life.”

Sassy retail campaigns have sprung up everywhere, purporting to “support the cause.” There is Save the Ta-Tas (a line that includes T-shirts and a liquid soap called Boob Lube), Save Second Base, Project Boobies (the slogan on its T-shirts promoting self-exam reads, “I grab a feel so cancer can’t steal,” though the placement of its hot-pink handprints makes it virtually impossible for them to belong to the shirt’s wearer). There is the coy Save the Girls campaign, whose T-shirt I saw in the window of my local Y.M.C.A. And there is “I ? Boobies” itself, manufactured by an organization called Keep a Breast (get it?).

Sexy breast cancer tends to focus on the youth market, but beyond that, its agenda is, at best, mushy. The Keep a Breast Foundation, according to its Web site, aims to “help eradicate breast cancer by exposing young people to methods of prevention, early detection and support.” If only it were that simple. It also strives to make discussion of cancer “positive and upbeat.” Several other groups dedicate a (typically unspecified) portion of their profits to “educate” about self-exam, though there is little evidence of its efficacy. Or they erroneously tout mammography as “prevention.”
There’s no question that many women, myself included, experience breast cancer as an assault on our femininity. Feeling sexual in the wake of mastectomy, lumpectomy, radiation or chemo is a struggle, one that may or may not result in a new, deeper understanding of yourself. While Betty Rollin acknowledged such visceral feelings about breasts, she never reduced herself to them. And in the 1990s, the fashion model Matuschka’s notorious photo of her own mastectomy scar (published on the cover of this magazine) demanded that the viewer, like breast-­cancer patients themselves, confront and even find beauty in the damage.

By contrast, today’s fetishizing of breasts comes at the expense of the bodies, hearts and minds attached to them. Forget Save the Ta-Tas: how about save the woman? How about “I ? My 72-Year-Old One-Boobied Granny?” After all, statistically, that’s whose “second base” is truly at risk.
Rather than being playful, which is what these campaigns are after, sexy cancer suppresses discussion of real cancer, rendering its sufferers — the ones whom all this is supposed to be for — invisible. It also reinforces the idea that breasts are the fundamental, defining aspect of femininity. My friend’s daughter may have been uncertain about what her bracelet “for breast cancer” meant, but I am betting she got that femininity equation loud and clear.

I hate to be a buzz kill, but breast cancer is just not sexy. It’s not ennobling. It’s not a feminine rite of passage. And, though it pains me to say it, it’s also not very much fun. I get that the irreverence is meant to combat crisis fatigue, the complacency brought on by the annual onslaught of pink, yet it similarly risks turning people cynical. By making consumers feel good without actually doing anything meaningful, it discourages understanding, undermining the search for better detection, safer treatments, causes and cures for a disease that still afflicts 250,000 women annually (and speaking of figures, the number who die has remained unchanged — hovering around 40,000 — for more than a decade).

As for me, I bear in mind the final statement that a college pal of mine who was dying of breast cancer (last October, in the midst of all that sexy pink) made to her younger brother. She was about to leave two young sons to grow up without a mother; her husband to muddle through without his wife. She could barely speak at the time, barely breathe. But when her brother leaned forward, she whispered two words in his ear: “This sucks.”

Obama administration must be commended for its newly announced support for the Paycheck Fairness Act (S. 182). This bill – a much needed update to the Equal Pay Act of 1963 – would take steps toward finally closing the wage gap between men and women by closing loopholes in the current law and strengthening weak remedies. Passage of the bill is one of the recommendations made by the administration’s Equal Pay Enforcement Task Force.
 
The Paycheck Fairness Act would provide workers with the tools they need to ensure equal compensation, including fair remedies, additional enforcement tools and technical assistance and training for both employers and employees. Last year, the House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed the Paycheck Fairness Act; the bill currently has 40 co-sponsors in the Senate and is poised for passage.

Here is the statement by the President –

In America today, women make up half of the workforce, and two-thirds of American families with children rely on a woman’s wages as a significant portion of their families’ income.
Yet, even in 2010, women make only 77 cents for every dollar that men earn. The gap is even more significant for working women of color, and it affects women across all education levels. As Vice President Biden and the Middle Class Task Force will discuss today, this is not just a question of fairness for hard-working women. Paycheck discrimination hurts families who lose out on badly needed income. And with so many families depending on women’s wages, it hurts the American economy as a whole. In difficult economic times like these, we simply cannot afford this discriminatory burden.
My Administration has already begun to address this problem. In my first week in office, I signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which helps women who face wage discrimination recover their lost wages, and in my State of the Union Address, I promised to crack down on violations of equal pay laws. Today the Equal Pay Enforcement Task Force will present its recommendations, which include ways to better coordinate among enforcement agencies and inform employees about their rights. These steps support women, and they also support businesses that are doing the right thing and paying their employees what they deserve.
We cannot do this work alone. So today, I thank the House for its work on this issue and encourage the Senate to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act, a common-sense bill that will help ensure that men and women who do equal work receive the equal pay that they and their families deserve. Passing this bill is one of the Task Force’s key recommendations, and I hope Congress will act swiftly so that I can sign it into law.